Research Outputs

In a global context marked by growing international forced displacement and migration, societies are becoming increasingly more diverse. The question of how to live together with newcomers has become a policy issue of utmost concern. While populist governments in Europe and in the US are failing to offer citizens and newcomers alternative models for living together that encourage greater ethnic, cultural and religious plurality, in this report we highlight the contributions and lessons drawn from local and civil-society initiatives that have been successful in bringing hosts and newcomers together. By analysing initiatives in Riace, Italy, Gaziantep, Turkey, and Berlin, Germany, we highlight the importance of a three-pronged approached to integration that combines governmental leadership, solid integration policies, and civil-society and locally-based initiatives that allow for personal interchanges between newcomers and hosts.

Citizens Initiatives Fostering Pluralism Around Europe

Radio Interview with Feyzi Baban. Open Radio, Istanbul, by Gurhan Ertug (in Turkish).

A growing refugee and migration crisis has imploded on European shores, immobilizing E.U. countries and fuelling a rise in far-right parties. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates the question of how to foster pluralism and a cosmopolitan desire for living with others who are newcomers. By looking at Berlin, Germany, the paper investigates community-based, citizen-led initiatives that open communities to newcomers, such as refugees and migrants, and foster cultural pluralism in ways that transform understandings of who is a citizen and belongs to the community. The paper brings insights from critical citizenship studies, exploring how citizenship is constituted through everyday practices, into dialogue with radical cosmopolitanism, particularly through Derrida’s works on ‘unconditional hospitality’.

The one-year anniversary of the “Cologne attacks” on some 1,200 women on New Year’s Eve is a difficult one for many Germans. Prior to the attacks, since the summer of 2015, Germany demonstrated remarkable leadership – unlike many other European countries – by providing refuge to a million people fleeing war in places like Syria, where nearly half the population fled their homes. Last year’s attacks, most of which took place in the Cologne train station and included sexual assault, rape and robbery, were a tipping and turning point for many Germans.

First Published February 17, 2014 , European Journal of Social Theory Volume 17, issue 4, 2014

Abstract

Right-wing parties and governments in Europe have recently expressed greater hostility towards cultural pluralism, at times officially denunciating multiculturalism, and calling for the closure of borders and denial of rights to non-European nationals. Within this context, this article argues for rethinking Europe through radically transgressive and transnational understandings of cosmopolitanism as articulated by growing transnational populations within Europe such as immigrants, refugees, and irregular migrants. Transgressive forms of cosmopolitanism disrupt European notions of borders and identities in ways that challenge both liberal multiculturalism and assimilationist positions. This article explores the limits of traditional cosmopolitan thinking while offering a vision of cosmopolitanism based on everyday negotiations with cultural differences, explained using two illustrative examples or snapshots.

Other publications by principal investigators

Dr. Kim Rygiel

Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement analyses recent shifts in governing global mobility from the perspective of the politics of citizenship. It investigates how restrictions on mobility are not only generating new forms of inequality and social exclusion, but also new forms of political activism and citizenship identities. In this context the book focuses the debate of migration, security, and mobility rights onto grassroots politics and social movements.

• Globalizing Citizenship, University of British Columbia, 2010.

Globalizing Citizenship examines border and detention policies as part of a larger politics of citizenship. It argues that citizenship is becoming a globalizing regime to govern mobility and access to rights and resources. The new mobility regime is not only deepening boundaries based on race, class, and gender, it is causing Western nations to embrace a more technocratic, depoliticized understanding of citizenship.

• (Ed. with Krista Hunt) (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, Routledge, 2007.

Virtually absent from the literature of the war on terror is an examination of the central role that gender, race, class and sexuality play in it. Analysts continuously resist to acknowledge identity-related social issues as central elements within global politics. The book examines the official war stories being told to the international community about why and against whom the war on terror is being waged and how international actors are using the war as an opportunity to reinforce existing gendered, raced, classed and sexualized inter/national relations.